Contact
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Would things have played out differently if Brennan *had* contacted Booth while he was in Afghanistan? Of course they would have. Very differently. Set during the gap between Season 5 and Season 6, before Booth meets Hannah. ***3rd chapter/epilogue added on 6/19/2013***
1. Initial Contact

**Contact**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rated:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those little moments that Hart and friends leave out. In this case, scenes from Booth's seven-month tour in Afghanistan and some insight into what that might have been like for him.

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**A/N:** _Special thanks to _**threesquares**_ who gave the idea a thumbs up in the morning & reviewed an early draft of the first few paragraphs in the afternoon while I was waiting in an airport gate area and gave me some quick feedback that was helpful in keeping the muse-train running. I owe you a cup of sweet, creamy chai goodness._

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**Chapter 1: Initial Contact**

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I killed a man today.

Four months into a twelve-month tour, one thing's for sure: he wasn't the first and he won't be the last. But knowing that doesn't make me feel any less shitty about it.

It doesn't hit you immediately—the remorse, that is. When you pull the trigger, whether it's a long-distance shot dropped in from 800 meters uprange or a close-quarters three-round burst from an M4 carbine in a shadowy alley, your skin's beading with sweat as you're trying to keep your heart from pounding and listen to everything around you despite the murmuring sound of blood roaring in your ears.

As soon as the round's gone downrange, the trigger springs back and you see the body fall, the first thing you feel is a flash of elation. Then it hits you—the enormity of what you've done. It may take five seconds, ten minutes or an hour, but the gravity of taking another man's life always catches up with you. It's always there, waiting for the roaring in your ears to fade a bit and the adrenaline in your veins to burn off, and as you come to your senses, it's there. It, too, fades after awhile, but it leaves a residue. And the more lives you take, the more of that residue is left behind until at some point, you can't wash yourself clean of it anymore.

I've added a lot more hashmarks to what Bones calls my cosmic balance sheet since coming to Afghanistan four months ago. Six of them are all mine—all on my head, with nobody to share the burden of responsibility with—because I saw those men's lives extinguished with a round that I know came from the business end of my M25 sniper rifle. I put the round there. I know it was mine.

I'm not 100% sure how many more men have died at my hands here. At least a dozen that I'm sure of, maybe a dozen more. I don't really know. The thought of it makes me sick to my stomach. Just like every one of the soldiers I've served with who didn't make it back from a mission, every man I kill is some mother's son. I know that what I'm doing here is right, and that the men I've killed had to be...well, they had to die that the lives of others might be saved. But a life is still a life.

And so that residue remains. It never goes away.

I feel unclean, and...well, maybe it doesn't make any sense, but I feel very far away from home right now.

I lay back on my bunk and breathe a long, deep sigh. I can hear First Sergeant Collins in the next bunk over snoring like a goddamn freight train, and for a minute, the odd sound of it—a raspy rumble followed by a funny little flutter of his lips—distracts me.

I would do anything to be home now.

I want to see my son Parker and give him a big protective dad-hug that makes him squirm and squeal, to hear him laugh and throw a ball around in the park with him.

I want to be able to sit at the Founding Fathers and have beer and wings as I watch a baseball game on TV. (This is an Islamic country. There's no alcohol here. I mean, not any that you'd actually want to drink. I won't touch the hooch that some of the soldiers and Marines here are brewing from God-knows-what.)

I want to get out of this shithole with all its up-armored Humvees, IEDs and RPG-7s so I can go back to my real job at the Hoover, chasing bad guys and catching murderers with Bones and the squints.

_Bones._

I reach under my pillow and feel around for the letter I'd stuck under there after mail call. I'd almost forgotten about it, with all the shit that was rattling around the inside of my head after this afternoon's mission.

It's always like that after we make enemy contact—all the adrenaline and shit gives me this weird kind of tunnel vision so that everything narrows and all I can think about is the mission. When I'm in that space, everything else just kind of melts away for a while. It takes an hour or so to come down from the adrenaline high, but then it's like coming off a really heavy caffeine buzz but ten times more intense, and you crash, and for a little while, your brain's just mush. It's not until you come out from the other side of that—the post-mission, post-adrenaline, post-crash brainfade—that you can read your mail and make any sense of anything.

I reach into my chest pocket and pull out my mini-Maglite and flip it on. I run my thumb over my name and the APO address on the front of the envelope:

_SGM Seeley J. Booth_  
_1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne)_  
_APO AE 09328_

I can feel the impression the ballpoint pen left on the envelope as I trace my finger over the letters. I'd recognize her handwriting anywhere. I'm glad that she hand-wrote the address on the front. I'm not sure why, but it makes me feel closer to her somehow.

I run my thumb underneath the sealed flap of the envelope. The envelope itself is made of a slick and thin material, and I'm careful not to tear it. My heart starts to race a little as I open the letter.

I open the envelope and pull out the letter. The paper is almost translucent and reminds me a little of onion skin. The flashlight's beam shines through the paper and I'm glad that she only wrote on one side because there's no fucking way I'd be able to read it by flashlight if she'd done her usual environmentally-friendly thing and saved paper by writing double-sided.

I unfold the onion-skin paper and smile at seeing the greeting "Booth," at the top. Everyone here calls me Booth, too, the same way we all call each other by our last names, but somehow, seeing my last name written in her handwriting, with its neat, precise, flowing script, feels different when I read it. I can hear her voice saying it and it rings in my head like the sound of my real name.

I take a breath and start to read:

_Booth,_

_Daisy and I had to come to Ternate Island (the most highly populated of the islands in the archipelago that forms Indonesia's Northern Maluku Province) to procure supplies and she suggested I take the opportunity to write you a short letter before we venture back to Bacan, the island where we've been working these last two months._

_So far our efforts haven't yielded anything of scientific interest but I am still hopeful that we will uncover evidence of interspecies mating between Homo floriensis and early Homo sapiens. Daisy is already growing impatient which is rather irritating but I am trying to maintain a positive attitude despite that fact and help her adapt to the slow pace of this sort of archaeological field work._

_I hope things are going well for you in Afghanistan and that you are keeping safe, although I have a feeling that you are doing as you always do—being selfless and taking risks—and for that reason I find myself oddly glad that I don't have access to news or current events, because I suspect that if I were to read about the military campaigns going on in Afghanistan it would, irrational as it may sound, only make me more worried for you than I already am._

_I can almost hear you lecturing me now about how I don't need to worry about you because you've been to war before, et cetera. It's odd. I find I miss your little lectures, and that I miss you, Booth, more than I expected to considering how busy I am with my fieldwork here in Maluku._

_I am not sure what else to say in this letter. While I am an excellent writer, I'm not a natural letter-writer and this kind of communication feels rather awkward to me. __I guess I will simply close by telling you that I miss you, and that I hope you are safe and well in Afghanistan. Please take care of yourself, Booth, and while it may be against your nature and thus a futile wish on my end, please don't be brave._

_Bones_

_Ternate City, Indonesia_  
_July 17, 2010_

The letter had taken two months to wind its way from whatever the hell Indonesian island Ternate City was on to the island that was Forward Operating Base Javelin a few kilometers outside of Marjah in rural Helmand Province. It was the first I'd heard from her since I saw her at Dulles, the day she left for Maluku. I left for Fort Bragg the next morning to start training with my new unit, Operational Detachment Alpha 3295, 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group. (_Hooah._) Since that morning, I'd heard nothing from her. After four months of silence, I wasn't sure I mattered to her anymore.

The letter I had in my hand was proof that I was wrong, and that I did.

I smile and read the letter again, stroking my fingers against the back of the letter as I feel each word embossed into the paper. The way the letter reads is so Bones_—_the wordiness, the complicated way she constructs her thoughts, the way she spelled out _et cetera _instead of abbreviating it like the other 99.9% of us would—and I can almost hear her voice reading it to me as I read it a third time. I arch my head back into my pillow and sigh, then carefully tuck the letter into the envelope it came in. I stare at it for a minute, wondering what it all means, and what we are, her and I, at this point. I take comfort in knowing that she's thinking about me, the same way I've been thinking about her. Even though I told her I was moving on, that I needed to find someone who could love me for thirty, forty or fifty years, the fact of the matter is, I'm not sure I can do that. I know I should, that no matter what she says in her letter about missing me and all that, that she isn't ready to try and make something with me. But still, I find myself thinking about her, all the time. I'm thinking about her every damn day when I wake up, wondering what she's doing and how she's getting on, and I think about her every night as I lay in my bed. I wonder if she lays in her bed in Maluku and thinks about me as often as I think about her.

I shrug away the thought. Rolling onto my side, my bunk creaks a little as I settle into a comfortable position and tuck my head into my pillow. I bring the letter in its little envelope to my lips, brushing the handwritten APO address over my lips once before I reach down and quietly open the Velcro pocket on the thigh of my Army Combat Uniform trousers. I carefully slip the letter into my pocket, where it takes its place next to the handmade card Parker'd made for me a couple of months ago. Pressing the flap closed, I pat my pocket and leave my hand resting there as I nuzzle my cheek into my pillow.

As far away from home as I feel right now, and as far away as I'll probably feel tomorrow when I go back out there with my guys and do everything in my power to make sure I bring every damn one of them back to their bunks tomorrow night, feeling those two little notes in my pocket makes me feel that I haven't completely lost contact with everything that's important to me—or the man I was before I got here.

And with that thought, I cross myself and thank God for getting me through another day, then close my eyes, hopeful that tonight, maybe I'll sleep a bit better than I did the night before.

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**A/N:** _This is what the Boothy angstmuse delivered to me today while I was in transit from Houston back to my home base in central Florida. I hope you liked that._

_Please let me know what you thought of that and take a minute to review. Seriously, getting reviews means I know people are reading this stuff. And knowing that people are reading makes me want to write more of it. So please, leave a review. Even a teeny tiny quick one would be hella awesome. *pleading Boothy puppy dog eyes*_

**A/N No. 2: **_After some conversations with a few readers, I decided to add a second chapter to show what happens when Booth writes back. __  
_

_Thanks for reading! And happy holidays._


	2. The Response

**Contact**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rated:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those little moments that Hart and friends leave out. In this case, scenes from Booth's seven-month tour in Afghanistan and some insight into what that might have been like for him.

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**A/N: **_Several readers who read "Contact" asked me if Booth would reply to Brennan's letter. At first, I'd intended "Contact" to be a standalone oneshot, but after some consideration, I decided to add a chapter containing Booth's response to her letter._

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**Chapter 2: The Response**

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It's Thursday, and today is my first day off after fifteen consecutive days of running missions with my guys. The sector we're operating in—Marjah, about a hundred miles west of Kandahar—is, at the moment anyway, one of the most active pockets of Taliban insurgency in all of Helmand Province. My twelve-man Special Forces detachment, of which I am the senior non-commissioned officer in charge, has been tasked with the training of two company-strength elements of Afghan National Army (ANA) troops, about 200 men, in counterinsurgency and urban warfare with the hope that, at some point, they'll be able to hold down the fort (so to speak) on their own, without American assistance, and keep the Taliban in check themselves.

I'm exhausted—absolutely, completely and thoroughly wiped—body, mind and soul. After breakfast and knocking out a few administrative tasks (the shitty side of being the detachment's NCOIC), I went back to the barracks and snagged a two-hour nap, and now I feel much better.

I'm sitting Indian-style on my bunk with a couple of sheets of blank paper and a hardbound book—a James Patterson cop novel—that Staff Sergeant Hoffman lent me to use as a makeshift clipboard after I promised to remove the dust jacket and not "muck it up." (Thanks for the vote of confidence there, Hoffman. _Fucker._)

I'm not sure exactly why I'm struggling so hard writing a letter back to Bones. This should be easy, right? But it's not. I have so much I want to say but I'm pretty sure 90% of it would be a really bad idea to put on paper.

How do I tell my partner, who told me a few months ago that we couldn't be a couple, that in the wee hours of the morning—when I'm laying in my bunk trying to rid my mind of the constantly-looped mental picture of a man's blood soaking into shrapnel-strewn sand and, even harder to flush from my head, the sucking sound you hear when he's trying to draw his dying breaths as his lungs and throat are filling with blood—that I close my eyes and think of her face, that gorgeous and flawless square-jawed face of hers, and focus every thread of thought on the way her pale eyes glitter back like two pieces of perfectly-cut blue topaz?

How do I tell her that she's the first thing I think about each morning before I even climb out of bed and the last thing I think about every night, and that as crazy as it sounds, I wouldn't want it any other way?

How do I tell her that she's the reason I consigned myself to this fucking hellhole and one of two reasons I know I'm gonna make it out of here alive and in one piece?

What the fuck am I supposed to say to her?

Never mind the fact that I've got to protect operational security (OPSEC) which means I can't go into any detail at all about what I'm doing here or even where exactly I am.

So what am I supposed to tell her?

I stare at the paper for about a half an hour before, annoyed at my own melodramatic ridiculousness, I finally start to write.

_Bones,_

_You have no idea how much it meant to me to get your letter the other day. I'm not exactly sure where Ternate City is relative to Jakarta or Maluku, but I'm sure glad you were able to find the time while you were there to send me a quick note. The constraints of operational security won't let me tell you exactly where I am or what I'm doing, but I can tell you I'm in Helmand Province and I'm doing the sort of thing I expected I'd be doing when I found out I was being sent to Fort Bragg. _

Bones is one of the smartest people on the planet. She can read between the lines. Before we left, we talked about what me being sent to Fort Bragg and getting assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group meant—that I'd be doing the traditional work of a Green Beret, training indigenous troops in insurgency/counterinsurgency tactics—and she knows enough about Afghanistan's geography to appreciate the kind of places I'm working in down here in Helmand.

What she doesn't know, and what I really don't want to tell her, is that my Green Beret comrades and I are leading these Afghan troops on missions outside of the wire and under enemy fire. We make enemy contact several times a week, and from time to time when it really starts to heat up around here, damn near every day. I've been fighting this war—and I mean really fighting it—since the day my boots hit the ground here in Helmand. I don't want to tell her that. I probably don't need to. Maybe she'll suspect it anyway, based on her comment at the end of her letter. _Please don't be brave. _But there's no point having her worry for me and my safety more than I know she already does. So I will just let that little sleeping dog lie.

_I miss you so much, Bones. I'm sure you can appreciate that, being away from all of the conveniences and familiar things of home (hell, what I'd do for a copy of the Sunday edition of the _Washington Post_ right now, or better yet, a copy of _Sports Illustrated!) _but it's really the little things I miss. I miss having lunch at the diner with you, and watching you steal my French fries even as you give me the ol' stink eye about eating my cholesterol-laden cheeseburger. I miss having coffee with you at the coffee cart on the Mall, and the way you'd get a fancy vanilla latte while I'd just get a plain tall coffee with cream. I miss doing paperwork with you (who'd ever imagine I'd ever say that, huh?) after gorging ourselves on Thai takeout. _

_It's funny how so many of the things I miss about life back home have to do with food. I can almost hear you now telling me that's because I have an insatiable appetite (and maybe that's a little true), but I think it's because of what my grandma used to say: "Our fondest memories live in our senses and eating good food, my boy, exercises all of the senses." I'm sure there's a fancy anthropological way to say that. But in any case, I think my gran, God rest her soul, was right. _

_I know I'm not the only one. One of the sergeants in my unit, Marquez, is from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the way he talks about his mama's cooking, and the dreamy look he gets on his face when he does, you'd swear he was talking about sex. (That sounds weird, but you know what I mean, Bones...)_

She's gonna read this and tell me I'm rambling. I just know it. Oh, Bones...a good letter rambles a bit. If it didn't, it'd be an essay, right? Or a treatise. Or some other kind of boring thing that I'd never have the patience to write.

_Anyway, the two things I miss most about home is you and Parker. So when your letter and the card he sent me finally caught up with me down here in Helmand (military mail is notoriously inefficient & inconsistent if you're in a forward area like I'm in), I nearly jumped out of my skin, I was so happy. _

_I got your letter on Sept 21st, which means it took just over 2 months to get to me. I hope this reply gets back to you quicker than that. I'm sending it to the address you gave me in Labuha. I'm not sure how frequently you check in there, but...well, I just hope I hear from you soon._

I stop and look at what I've written. My hand's cramping up a little, which makes my block printing look a bit more like chicken-scratch, so I shake it out a bit before I take a deep breath and continue.

_I thought maybe you'd want to see a picture of me here. There's a Marine unit stationed here in the same area I'm in, and I talked one of the guys in the 7th Marine Regiment S2 (intel) section into taking a picture of me & printing it out on the printers they've got in the S2 shop (they have all the good stuff, those bastards!). You'll have to forgive the scruffy appearance but if you want to see what I look like most days, there you are. _

I hear three of the other guys in the detachment laugh out loud as they sit in the corner of the barracks playing cards. Glancing at my watch, I realize I've frittered away nearly an hour working on this letter, which normally wouldn't be an issue on a day off except that I have to debrief the detachment commander, Major Emsing and his exec officer, Captain Johanning, at 1600 hours.

Time to wrap this baby up, I tell myself.

_Unfortunately, although I wish I could write more, I do have to go. Gotta give a report to my bosses (the brass who head up my detachment) so I need to scoot. I hope this letter finds you (and Daisy, too) well. With any luck, you've found some evidence of the Missing Link out there in the jungle and are staying safe from the cannibal headhunters there in Maluku... _

_All joking aside, please be safe, Bones, and rest assured that I'm safe, too. I'll be thinking about you, each and every day. Take care of yourself, okay?_

_Missing you,_

_Booth_

I sign my name with a flourish to the "B" and finish with a little wiggly line for the "h," then look at what I've written. Skimming my letter, I wonder if Bones will be as happy to receive my letter as I was to get hers. Frowning a bit at how messy my handwriting got towards the end of the letter, I wonder if she'll read it once and stash it away somewhere for safekeeping, or whether—as I did with hers—she'll keep it close at hand to reread and re-reread in the days after she receives it. How long it it take for my letter to get to Labuha? How long will the letter sit at the post office in Labuha before she comes to town to fetch it? Will she be surprised that I wrote her back? At the last question, I shrug silently and stuff the letter into the envelope. Surely she knows me well enough to know that I would write her back. No matter what happened between us back in D.C. last spring, or how awkward things were in the last weeks before we left, she has to know that I still care for her, and that I miss her as sorely as she misses me.

Right?

I think about that, and find myself lost in thought for a minute or two before the relative quiet of the barracks is shattered by a racket that makes me turn my head in annoyance.

"What is it?" I growl at the interruption as I quickly tuck Bones' letter into the slanted Velcro-flapped pocket on the chest of my camouflage uniform jacket.

Sergeant First Class Schrader, a ruddy-faced Nebraskan in his late 20s, stumbles through the door then straightens up with an awkward cough. I can see him swallowing nervously and smirk a little at seeing how I still manage to intimidate the young sergeants underneath me even after all these months.

"You know that lady reporter and her photographer we took into custody yesterday?" he asks.

I roll my eyes, remembering all too well how the admittedly attractive blonde managed to get herself right in the line of fire downrange of a Taliban sniper and how I had to personally bail her ass out, neutralizing the sniper—not killing him, but merely wounding him so he dropped his weapon and a couple of the ANAs were able to nab him as he was limping out of his position—and yanking her out of that cafe before she could make any more trouble.

"Yeah," I grunt. "The one we arrested for being in a secure area without proper authorization." I grimace and add with a bit of a sneer, "Hannah Burley." I can feel my blood pressure going up just thinking how I had to put my men at risk to save her sorry ass. I have no problem putting my men or myself at risk for the mission. She was not the fucking mission.

"Yes, Sergeant Major," he stutters. "She wants us to contact her network, NBC News and—"

"I could give a rat's ass what she wants, Schrader," I say with a scowl. "We have a mission to carry out here. Dealing with intermeddling journalists isn't it, no matter how hot you and Staff Sergeant Hopkins think she is. Let the MPs and the S2 deal with her. She's not our concern. We have a mission, and she ain't it..."

He raises his eyebrows and gives me a puzzled look. "But—"

"No," I bark, standing up from my bunk and walking towards him. I glare at him. "Listen, Schrader—in case you forgot, we're a Special Forces detachment. Our job is to train Afghans to fight this war to free their country from the fucking Dark Ages, not to act as babysitters for rogue reporters who conveniently forget they're in an active warzone." I cock my head to the side and take another quick glance at my watch. "If I'd wanted to do that shit, I'd've gone in as an MP to fucking begin with."

He reaches up and scratches his head. "So, uhhh, you—"

My jaw hardens and I give him a rigid, narrow-eyed stare that would peel the paint off of walls. "Call the fucking Military Police, Schrader. Let _them _deal with Hannah Burley and her fucking network. You, me and the rest of this unit have an insurgency to fight, okay?"

He nods numbly and, shrugging once, jogs out of the barracks. I lean my head back and take a deep, relaxing breath, trying to clear my head knowing that I have to debrief my officers in about five minutes.

Shaking my head, I steal a glance over at Macon, Jacobson and Finnerty who have fallen silent as they pore over their cards in yet another game of five-card stud. I reach into my chest pocket and pull out my letter to Bones and read the address on the front, then turn it over and lick the flap of the envelope. I look at it for a minute and can't help but smile as I rub my thumb over her name, "Dr. Temperance Brennan."

I press the letters of her name to my lips and kiss it softly before stuffing the envelope back into my pocket and making my way out of the barracks.

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**A/N: **_So there you are. What did you think of that? Sometimes it only takes a small gesture to change the course of history and to make a difference in someone's life._

_Please let me know what you thought of this second chapter of "Contact" and take a minute to review. Seriously, getting reviews means I know people are reading this stuff. And knowing that people are reading makes me want to write more of it. So please, leave a review. Even a teeny tiny quick one would be hella awesome. _

_Thanks!_


	3. Close Contact (Epilogue)

**Contact**

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**By: **dharmamonkey**  
****Rating: **T**  
****Disclaimer: **I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

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**A/N:** _Six months ago, in December of 2012, I wrote the two chapters of "Contact." I marked the story complete at that point, and for a long time I felt that it more or less __was__ complete. But for whatever reason, the muse coughed up an epilogue to that story. Just goes to show that you never really know what the muse will deliver, or when a tale is told. In any case, I hope you enjoy it._

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**Chapter 3: Close Contact (Epilogue)**

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For seven months, all we had of one another were our letters.

I ended up receiving two letters from Bones while I was deployed. The second was a response to my rambling reply to the letter she wrote me in mid-July, the second month of her dig in Maluku, which I received two months later after it finally wound its way to me at my forward operating base in Helmand Province. I wrote her back immediately, and by some kind of divine providence, my reply reached her just five weeks later. Her second letter, written a few days after she received mine, arrived ten days before I left to come back to the States.

Even though it arrived so late in my deployment, that second letter from her proved to be a godsend because those last ten days turned out to be one of the worst stretches of my whole deployment. To be honest, I'm not sure how I'd have gotten through that time had I not had her words whispering in my head and that little letter tucked in my thigh pocket next to the first one she sent to me. I'd have put them in my chest pocket but didn't because, if I had, I wouldn't have been able to reach them while wearing my body armor.

It's not like I took the letters out and read them in the middle of a firefight, but from time to time I would reach into my pants pocket and just touch them, the same way I would reach under my shirt and touch my St. Christopher medal when I needed a boost or a little bit of comfort. I'd just reach down, slip my hand into that Velcro'd pocket and run my fingers over the envelopes, then go back to doing whatever I was doing. (And let me just say that whatever asshole came up with the bright idea of putting Velcro closures on the Army Combat Uniform has obviously never (1) been in actual combat or (2) been in a meeting and opened up a Velcro'd bag with a loud _rriiiiipp _and had everyone in the room turn and look at him. Velcro and stealth don't go together. Idiots.)

They were like a talisman, I guess. I carried those letters with me everywhere I went, and they were my lifeline when the shit got real and a mission went south. A couple of days after I got her second letter, I was out on a morning patrol with a squad of my Afghan National Army guys, working our way down a residential side street when we heard a massive explosion coming from the bazaar the north end of which was one block over from where we were. The explosion was huge—loud enough that our ears were buzzing from the sound of the blast—and I knew instantly that whatever we'd find, it was going to be horrific.

I ran with my six ANA guys down the block and around the corner and found the bazaar in complete pandemonium. There were dozens of dead bodies in front of what used to be a _chillim _(hookah) vendor's stall, and wounded people—at least a hundred—everywhere. The ones who could walk were shouting and crying and groaning as they aimlessly milled about while the more badly injured lay on the ground, moaning unintelligibly or begging us for help in Pashto. My six men and I secured the area, radioed for assistance from a Marine Corps shock trauma platoon and an explosive ordinance disposal unit stationed a couple clicks away in the next town over, then four of my men began to give first aid to the wounded while I and one of the others went over to inspect the twisted, charred remains of what looked like a mid-80s vintage Toyota pickup truck.

I remember collapsing onto my bunk in the barracks that afternoon, my ACUs soaked in sweat, smeared with blood and covered in the loose, pale dust that followed me everywhere I went in Helmand. I was exhausted, not just by the gravity of the day's grim events but also by the realization that nothing I was doing in Helmand made a damn bit of difference in the big scheme of things. The market bombing that morning was more or less the same in scope and effect as the IED I saw explode in a similar market an hour north of there in the town of Qūryah just a few days after I arrived in-country. I lay there, too tired to even cry but feeling too empty to do anything else, when I heard the envelopes in my pocket crinkling against my thigh as I squirmed around on my rack.

I must've read that letter at least a dozen times since getting it at mail call two days before, and I had the contents halfway memorized at that point, but I still reached into my pocket and pulled it out. Leaning back against my pillow, I lifted the flap of the little envelope and carefully plucked the letter out, unfolding it and holding it up to the fading afternoon light that shone through the window of my barracks. I held the letter in my hand, which was still shaking a little from the craziness of the day, and found it oddly comforting to see Bones' neat, precise, angular script on the white, almost translucent paper beneath my dust-caked thumb. My thumbnail was ringed with dried blood, which also had worked its way underneath the nail, as it had the rest of my fingers after the two pair of nitrile surgical gloves in my field kit both tore as I was giving first aid to the wounded waiting for the Navy medical corpsmen to get there and take over. But holding that letter of hers made me feel just a little less stained and a little bit closer to home than I did just minutes before.

For a while, I just kind of stared at Bones' handwriting, the words themselves an indistinct blur as I felt some of the tension melt away at being able to touch something she'd touched. It was as if that letter itself was an extension of her hand and through the words themselves she curled her slender fingers around mine.

_It's strange, Booth. I am a very talented and well-regarded writer, but I find myself struggling for words as I write to you now. Back home, it seemed that sometimes we didn't even need to speak to each other to be understood. But now, I have so many things I want to say to you and I can't begin to find the words to say them. I can only say that I miss you. I miss you more than I really even thought possible. When I got here, I figured that my work would keep me busy and occupy my thoughts so that I could forget about you for a while, and about how badly I felt about how things had gone between us in the last few months before we left. But the opposite has proven the case. I think about you all the time. I mean, not literally __all__ the time, but it's surely true that I spend many hours of my waking day thinking about you as I go about the fairly tedious but frequently mindless work of a field archaeologist—digging, brushing, marking, measuring, recording and so on. These things do not occupy my entire mind, and so I find myself thinking about you. About us. About how much I miss hearing your voice. Your witty chatter. Your laugh. Your companionship. Your wisdom. I miss it all, and you, so much, I can't even describe it in words._

While I'm still not really sure how Caroline managed to pull it off—although I'm pretty sure it probably involved her calling in a favor with Deputy Director Cullen, and him calling in a favor with somebody else, and so on up the chain until someone prodded someone at U.S. Central Command or Special Operations Command to have me PCS'd back home five months before the end of my tour—it was less than thirty-six hours from the time I was told to wrap things up and transition my duties to another NCO in the Operational Detachment until I was strapping myself into a jump seat on the next-available C-17 heading stateside from Bagram.

I was given so little notice before heading back to the States, I wasn't able to wait for a regularly-scheduled personnel transport to take me home. So I was put on a C-17 bound for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and the only other passengers in the back of the plane with me were three soldiers, two Marines and a Navy corpsman, all of them strapped to the deck in flag-draped aluminum transfer cases bound for Dover where they would be prepared for burial before being released to their families. I sat back there in the cold, stripped-down, uncomfortable cargo compartment staring at the boxed-up remains of six men who, unlike me, would never get to go home to hold their kids or love their wives or live out their days in the quiet peace of a civilian existence. As strange as it felt coming home early from my deployment, what weighed more heavily on me was the prospect of having to spend the long series of flights (from Bagram to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and finally to Dover) alone but for the quiet company of the dead. Unable to sleep and unable to get my mind to stop spinning in noisy circles about all the things that had happened to me and to the men who served with me, I reached once more into my thigh pocket and pulled out Bones' second letter.

_Twelve months didn't seem like a long time when we parted ways at Dulles, but now, as I sit here in the Indonesian jungle searching fruitlessly for the footprints of our human forebears, it seems like an interminably long time. And while I would be the first to admit that Daisy's upbeat chatter can grow incredibly tedious as the weeks have turned to months, what really makes the passage of time seem painfully slow is the fact that you are not here. You and I, together, have gotten each other through so many things and endured those things because, well, we endured them together. But here, in Maluku, you're not here. And that—__that__, Booth—has proven the most difficult thing of all to endure. I could tell you that receiving your letter on my last trip to pick up supplies in Labuha was a pleasant surprise, but it was much, much more than that. It lifted my spirits the way nothing else could—nothing except for you, really. You've always been able to do that: to make me smile, to make me laugh, to ease my worries. And I miss that. I miss you. _

Sitting there, staring at those six flag-draped coffins, I felt low. I felt guilty for leaving that place before any of my comrades could, for leaving that place alive when so many of my brothers-in-arms didn't. But holding her letter in my hand, and seeing those words on the page, and being able to feel each of the words with my fingers as I read, made me feel like I wasn't alone. The pain was still there, but the emptiness, the worthlessness—the sense that the whole fucking enterprise was a pointless waste of time, and blood, and lives—somehow didn't feel as acute, or cut me as deeply, to know that on the other end of it all, on the other end of this journey, she would be there. She would be there, waiting for me. Because she had. She'd waited for me. Although she didn't say so in so many words, it seemed to me that she wasn't able to move on any more than I could. And knowing that gave me hope that somehow, despite all the men I killed over there, and all the men I saw die, and all the horror I witnessed in the months I was there, some good came of it all, and that hope in turn gave me the last measure of strength I needed to get through this last awful part of my journey.

I knew that the journey had been difficult for her, too. I could hear it in the silent spaces between the words she wrote on the page, but I knew that, while her path had ventured over different ground than mine—not easier or harder, but just different—she seemed to have ended up in the same place I had. She wanted to come home. She wanted to come home to me, no less than I yearned to come home to her.

_The next six months couldn't pass soon enough. I would leave this place today—this very afternoon—if I knew that you'd be there when I got home. Does that sound weak, Booth? Or dependent? Well, I don't know about weakness, since I've never considered myself a weak individual, but I have to admit that if this separation has taught me anything, it is that I really have come to depend on you in ways I never even realized were possible. And the knowledge of that makes the separation all that much more painful and needless, and the prospect of seeing you again (and of receiving your reply to this missive) that much brighter a beacon to focus on as I endure each passing day._

Even still, as I jog down these stone steps towards the place we'd agreed to meet with my heavy Army duffel bag slung over my shoulder, I feel a dark swirl of doubt deep in my belly.

Have I read too much into her letters?

Have I seen in her words what I wanted to see?

Heard in them what I wanted to hear?

Have I been fooling myself, the same way I fooled myself the night so many months ago I told her we should give it a chance?

I look down at my feet as I descend that last step onto the plaza and I take a deep breath, then look up again and, suddenly, that sick swirl of worry that had been gurgling in the pit of my stomach dissolves away as I see her standing there, her trusty old canvas messenger bag slung casually over her shoulder. She turns around, and I see her face again for the first time in what seems like an eternity. Her hair is short, even shorter than it was when I saw her last at Dulles, and she has bangs—cute little bangs that hang over her forehead and frame that pretty face of hers. She's pursing her lips as she turns to look at me over her shoulder, and in that little gesture, I can see that I am not the only one who came here tonight with a mix of uncertainty and hope. But as soon as our eyes meet, that hesitant little pout on her lips vanishes, and I see her mouth curve into a smile as those blue eyes of hers light up.

Even at a distance, it's her eyes that enthrall me. Just like it was that very first day I saw her six years ago in that lecture hall at American University, it's her eyes that cut right through to my heart, and it's those eyes that make my breath catch in my throat as I walk quickly across the big stones of the plaza to meet her.

"Hi," I say, unable in that moment to think of anything better to greet her with. We haven't spoken in seven months, yet it seems like we've said so much, and shared so deeply, that words fail me as I wait to hear the sound of her voice again.

She runs to me and throws her arms around me, but still she doesn't say anything. Her fingers press against the ripstop of my ACU shirt, almost clawing at it as I hold her close, and I can feel her whole body press against me as I find myself touching her silky hair, stroking it with the tips of my fingers as I breathe in the smell of her. I feel better, somehow, that she hasn't showered or changed clothes since leaving Maluku, because I had only enough time after getting to Bagram to wash my sandy, greasy hair with a squirt of hand soap in a men's room sink and change into a fresh pair of underwear before hopping onto that C-17 transport. She hugs me close again, and I can feel her breasts crushing against my chest. I try not to think about the fact that she doesn't seem to be wearing a bra as we pull apart again and give each other a long head-to-toe look.

"You look great," I say to her, my voice cracking a little on the edges.

She chuckles a little at that, then smiles and says, "You do, too, Booth."

We stand there awkwardly for a minute, just kind of drinking in the sight of one another, then I gesture towards the stone steps behind us with a jerk of my chin. She gives me a soft smile and a nod, and I pick up my heavy duffel with a grunt and carry it back over to the same steps I'd just walked down.

I sit next to her on the steps, close enough that our hips almost touch, and I look over at her. The Indonesian sun was good to her, it seems. She has a warm, healthy glow to her skin even though she's been sitting in airplanes and airports at least as long as I have. We just look at each other with goofy grins on our faces but neither of us say anything, each of us still swimming in our own thoughts as we take a visual inventory of the other.

After a minute, she gives me an awkward smile and asks, "So, was it dangerous in Afghanistan?"

I hesitate for a second. She shared so much with me in her letters, and I'd tried to bare myself in that letter I sent her, as best I could at the time anyway, but I hadn't told her much about what I was actually doing in Afghanistan. I am not sure what to tell her. I don't want her to worry for me, but even more, I don't want her to pity me or feel responsible for anything that I did over there, or anything that happened over there. I don't want to taint her with the stain of everything I saw and did there.

So I shrug and say, "No, what I did was mostly administrative..."

But I can see from the way her pale blue eyes flicker and narrow that she knows that I'm not telling her the truth, and I can tell by the slight frown that makes the corners of her mouth droop that she wants to know what I really did.

For the longest time, I have not wanted to talk to anyone, at least not to anyone who hasn't been to war, about what I experienced "over there," and my first impulse now is to do the same—to pack up all of those horrible things I did, the awful places I went, the men I killed and the many other men I saw die, and all the shit I can't even describe, and stow it all away in a dark, dusty corner inside of me where I don't have to think about it or talk about it or deal with it. I just want to be done with it.

I close my eyes and sigh, and when I open them again I see her eyes—big and blue and open, glistening with interest and something else, empathy I guess—and I think of how she opened her heart to me in those letters.

_"I—I don't have your kind of open heart,"_ she had said to me that night we left the Hoover and came here, to this place. I bared my heart to her that night, and came away wounded and seared with pain.

But since that night, Bones has proven herself wrong and showed us both how open her heart truly is. She bared that beautiful, loving, open heart to me in her letters, and in doing that, helped me hold myself together in a place full of despair.

And that's how I know.

_I know._

I know I have to bare myself, to open my heart to her the way she has opened hers to me, and to let her see the things I saw over there—at least, those things which I can tell her, leaving out the things that are classified. I owe her that. She deserves that.

I smile awkwardly. "Yeah," I concede. "It's a mess over there. A nightmare."

Her eyes widen a little and her mouth falls open, but for a second, she doesn't say anything. She reaches over and touches my hand, curling her fingers around my palm and giving my hand a little squeeze. "I'm sorry," she whispers as she brings her other hand around to touch my wrist. I feel her fingers slip under the cuff of my ACU sleeve and hear her draw a breath as her finger traces over the top of my forearm.

I swallow as she pulls back my sleeve and reveals a two inch long scar just above my wrist. "Shrapnel," I say quietly. I see her wince and feel her squeeze my hand again, but she gives me a silent nod and urges me to continue. "There was an IED, you know. In Qūryah, where I was sent when I first got there. I wasn't close to it. I was pulling up the rear as another soldier led the ANAs—the Afghan National Army guys—down a road alongside an irrigation canal." Just thinking about it, I can feel my muscles tighten, and I clench my fist, crushing the camoflauge patrol cap I'm holding in my left hand as I remember the way the dust tickled my nose as the wind blew across the irrigation ditch to our left. "I was forty, fifty feet away, the last guy in the whole string of us that was walking by, when the thing went off. My buddy Daniels and four of the ANAs were fucking ripped apart—killed instantly when they walked by what looked like a harmless patch of grass and rocks. Four of the other guys, all Afghans, were torn up pretty bad. One of 'em lost his leg. Another one an eye. I got hit in the arm and in the hip..." I glance over at her and see her gaze drop to my waist, lingering there for a couple of seconds before she looks up at me again. "Hurt like a motherfucker but the surgeons at the Marine Medical Battalion were able to get all of the pieces out. Screws and ball bearings and shit. Classic IED, you know..."

She leans over and nuzzles her head against my shoulder. "I'm sorry, Booth," she says.

I reach over and touch her head, caressing her soft hair with my hand as I turn and kiss the top of her head, letting my lips linger as I breathe in a noseful of her. "It's okay," I tell her. "You know...I, uhhh...I'll be okay."

For a minute, we're quiet, and she just sits there, leaning against me as I stroke her hair, each of us content to soak up the closeness. Then she pulls away and sits up again, and I reach over, placing my hand on the small of her back, for some reason unwilling to not touch her, to not feel her.

"I made a mistake," she tells me, but then falls silent again.

"So did I, Bones," I say to her, rubbing my hand against her back. "So did I."

I am not sure what mistake she thinks she made, but I know exactly what I did wrong. I've been thinking about it for months, since the day we said goodbye at Dulles. I shouldn't have pushed her. I know that now. But the bigger mistake, I think, was me fooling myself into thinking I could move on, and telling her I could. Thank God that she reached out and sent me that letter when she did. I don't know what would have happened if she hadn't, but getting that letter when I did, after the two I'd sent to her went unanswered—although now I suspect they never reached her at all, since she never mentioned them in her letters to me, and with everything else she opened up to me about, I think she would have mentioned my letters had she actually received them—gave me a glimmer of hope at a time when I was close to running out of it.

She sighs and looks at me, her big blue eyes wistful and yet, somehow, open. She meets my gaze and holds it for a moment, then smiles a little smile that makes her seem almost like a girl for a second. She takes a deep breath and shrugs a little, then says, "Booth, I..." But her voice trails off.

I look into her eyes and I feel my cheeks flush as she gives me a sweet, almost bashful little smile and my chest suddenly fills with a warmth I haven't felt in—well, not since the moment I read each of those letters for the first time—and it's then I lean in close to her again, transfixed by her beautiful eyes as I hear her draw a breath. She moves closer to me, then hesitates, but I see something in her eyes shift, darkening them a little as she gives me a faint, almost imperceptible nod and leans in again. My mouth falls open and it feels like my whole body is suddenly engulfed in flame as feel her lips meet mine and the space between us suddenly ceases to exist.

Her lips are slightly chapped, no doubt from the constant recirculation of dry air on the inside of aircraft cabins as she wound her way from Jakarta to Honolulu to Los Angeles and finally to Dulles, but as I feel those lips brush against mine, they feel soft and warm and perfect.

"Bones," I whisper against those lips in the fraction of a second before I feel them part and her tongue lick into my mouth.

_Oh Jesus,_ I think, a raw flash of desire and love and hope and joy surging through me as that sweet tongue of hers slides against mine. I can feel every thread of tension in my body—every worry, every pain, every disappointment, every anguish—and every longing that had coiled around me in the long months since the night I last kissed her, the night when it seemed everything that I wanted was shattered in an instant, suddenly dissolving away as I let myself sink into that kiss.

The hand that had been splayed against the small of her back slides across her hip as my arm snakes around her waist and I tug her close. I hear her murmur and swallow it into our kiss as I pull away slightly and open my eyes, unable to contain a smile as I see her beautiful face glow and her cheeks flush a gorgeous pink.

"Booth," she sighs as she angles her head and leans in again, those soft, slender lips of hers grasping hungrily at mine as she demands another kiss. The stone plaza in front of us and the stairs beneath us seem to spin and twirl in a steep spiral as we lose ourselves in the feel of one another, grasping and sucking and licking and swallowing up the other until our eyes fill with pricking points of light and we have to pull apart and just breathe.

That's when I know, and I look at her, my chest heaving as I struggle to catch my breath, and I know that she knows, too.

We may have been half a world apart, but the fact is that we've been moving closer together, drawing closer and closer as we opened our hearts to one another until the space between us no longer really existed, no matter how many miles separated us.

And it all began with a letter.

* * *

**A/N****:** _Alright, so I think it's safe to say this story is now truly complete. The reaching out for one another has come full circle, and there's little doubt that the center will hold._

_Please, tell me what you thought of this unexpected epilogue to a story most of you probably forgot about._

_Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Please, leave a review._


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